New Blackfriars - 2011 - Cirelli - Facing The Abyss Hans Urs Von Balthasar S Reading of Anxiety

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DOI:10.1111/j.1741-2005.2010.01388.x
Facing the Abyss: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s

Reading of Anxiety
Anthony Cirelli
Abstract
At the heart of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s oeuvre is his preoccupation

with the encounter between finite human freedom and infinite di-
vine freedom. While Balthasar’s many interpreters have assayed the
meaning and implications of this preoccupation, little attention has
been given to his consideration of the experiential dimension of the
encounter, especially the psychological implications. This essay will
address such implications by relating the experience of the encounter
to the particular psychological phenomenon of anxiety. It is my con-
viction that Balthasar clearly identified a correlation between the in-
creasing presence of existential anxiety in modernity with the failure
of modern persons to understand rightly the encounter between God
and the person. Balthasar’s assessment of the relationship between
the encounter and anxiety provides his readers with a stimulating
and original reading that complements, indeed completes, the philo-
sophical renderings of anxiety provided by his contemporaries. Since
the phenomenon of anxiety has not abated, a retrieval of Balthasar’s
work on the subject is both warranted and timely.
Keywords
Hans Urs von Balthasar, anxiety, theology and psychology, encounter,
ontological difference, existential
I. Introduction
In his 1952 work Der Christ und die Angst, Hans Urs von Balthasar
argues that the experience of the ontological difference, which he
understands to be the difference between finite human freedom and
infinite divine freedom, is the origin and determination of exis-
tential anxiety.1 It is Balthasar’s contention that this experiential
1
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Der Christ und die Angst [hereafter abbreviated CA] (Ein-
siedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1951); English translation: The Christian and Anxiety, trans.

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706 Facing the Abyss: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Reading of Anxiety
phenomenon can only be rightly understood by means of a the-

ological interpretation. In an original interpretive stroke, Balthasar
situates anxiety in its biblical context, that is, by explicating anxiety
in terms of a dramatic encounter that unfolds in the Judeo-Christian
narrative between God and humanity.2 Balthasar’s attempt to interpret
existential anxiety theologically thus advances, indeed goes beyond,
the classic analyses of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Freud.
In this essay, I shall articulate one dimension of Balthasar’s thought
that has received no attention: namely, his theological elucidation of
anxiety that originates with the experience of the ontological differ-
ence between finite and infinite freedom. In order to accomplish this
task, I shall first explicate what Balthasar means by this experience
of the ontological difference, which he works out in terms of subjec-
tive limit and objective mystery. Second, I shall introduce the impetus
for Balthasar’s theological response to anxiety. Third, I shall present
Balthasar’s assessment of the classical interpretations of anxiety by
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Freud. This third section will provide
the reader with a broader context for understanding why Balthasar
distances himself from, and goes beyond, modern philosophical inter-
pretations of anxiety by means of his original theological response.
Fourth, I shall articulate Balthasar’s christocentric solution to the
problem of anxiety that arises in the encounter between the infinite
God and the finite person.
II. The experience of the ontological difference
The psychiatrist and philosopher Rudolph Allers, an early mentor of

Balthasar, once remarked that in his experience all cases of neuroses
originate with a metaphysical crisis, namely, a failure of finite sub-
jects to accept their finitude and radical dependence on the infinite
approximation of their conscious horizon (i.e., God).3 To Allers, the
“metaphysical problem,” moreover, is always tied to an obsession
with self, which leads to the failure of accepting one’s limitations.
Consequently, Allers contends, one is filled with an unremitting con-
cern for one’s own ego, which is perceived as being in constant peril.
What emerges is a successfully disguised egocentricity that is an
Dennis D. Martin and Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000). All sub-
sequent references are to the German text (translations are my own) with corresponding
pages of the English text. Balthasar understands anxiety as the experience of one’s finitude
or lack of freedom to realize the infinite horizon that constitutes conscious life. His un-
derstanding, therefore, is concerned with the distinctively existential rather than biological
manifestation of anxiety.
2
Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work in Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1993), 35.
3
Rudolph Allers, The Psychology of Character (London: Sheed & Ward, 1931), 347.

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Facing the Abyss: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Reading of Anxiety 707
essential component of the neurotic character: “The neurotic,” Allers

contends, “is like a man gazing into a small hand-mirror that reflects
his own features, but excludes the outside world.”4 In other words,
human anxiety is understood by Allers to be, at its root, a meta-
physical problem that translates as a breakdown in the relationship
between the finite person and the infinite God that occurs whenever
the inner world of a person is dominated by an obsession with self
preservation; and so, being alone in one’s finitude, one perseveres in
the avoidance or rejection of the presence of the infinite—a presence
that is inextricably linked with conscious life and which overshadows
one’s inner world precisely as the horizon of freedom that alone can
save a person from his or her anxiety.
Balthasar relates the experience of the ontological difference (i.e.,
between finite and infinite freedom) and anxiety in a manner con-
sistent with Allers’ own understanding. To Balthasar, this encounter
with the infinite is potentially anxiety producing, insofar as anxi-
ety is understood to be the experience that emerges in the meta-
physical space or, as Balthasar puts it, the void (Leere) between
God and man whenever one turns away from God and toward the
self.5 Balthasar understands this void as being a constitutive dimen-
sion of the inner life of each person where God qua the myste-
rious infinite ought to be experienced in the act of faith.6 How-
ever, Balthasar opines that because of sin, which in this context
means the turning away from God, this void is experienced by
humans as the radical absence of God.7 Though we shall discuss
this more fully below, the point is that when the observance of
faith and trust in God is absent in the conscious, intentional life
of a human being, the moment one experiences the presence of the
infinite, which is perceived, Balthasar contends, as a foreign, even
threatening presence, one faces a life-shaping decision: one either
enters into the space of this mystery or turns away, in which case a
void that can never be understood fully emerges where God ought
to be—thus producing anxiety. The encounter with this strange pres-
ence, that is, the void that betokens the presence of infinite freedom,
is experienced as something like spiritual vertigo (Schwindel), that
is, experienced as an endless abyss that one cannot claim as one’s
own, nor understand, nor fill, nor even cross by one’s own power.8
To the extent that one turns away from this encounter, one becomes,
as Augustine would put it, blind to God’s presence; and so, one
perceives and interprets the mysterious presence of the infinite as a
4
Ibid., 348.
5
Balthasar, CA, 80 (Eng., 133–134).
6
Ibid., 81 (Eng., 135).
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., 79 (Eng., 132).

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void, a nothingness.9 By means of sin, therefore, one makes thicker

the veil that divides man and God; in effect, one pushes God away,
thus rendering oneself open to the onslaught of anxiety. Tragically,
such an experience, Balthasar contends, has been interpreted in ways
that have led ineluctably to subjectivism or “identity” thinking (i.e.,
the subject as locus of the Absolute) as the person attempts to close
the gap between the finite and infinite dimensions of his inner world
precisely by defining them as the constitutive make-up of the self,
which entails claiming for oneself infinite freedom. Such a Hegelian-
like sublation not only makes God/the infinite dependent upon the
finite, but also serves to intensify anxiety as one remains trapped,
indeed suffocated, in one’s self-preoccupation; and this precisely be-
cause the infinite is no longer something one has faith in but rather
something one identifies with oneself.10 Yet, for Balthasar, the fi-
nite and infinite maintain an absolute difference, as manifested by
the experience of the void that such a sublation ineluctably creates
between them. Nevertheless, to Balthasar’s thinking, the galvanizing
factors of such a vertiginous experience, which, again, originate at
the border of one’s encounter with the infinite approximation of the
inner world of self-consciousness, are identified by Balthasar as the
concrete experiences of subjective limit and objective mystery.
With respect to subjective limit, the uneasy experience of spiritual
vertigo that overcomes the person who realizes this limit is, again,
nothing other than the awareness of the infinite by the finite and the
finite person’s realization of his or her absolute inability to erect a
“bridge” between them. Being finite and guilty of sin (i.e., turning
away from God), one experiences oneself to be limited and, in a
sense, exiled from that same infinite horizon. On this point, Balthasar
is echoing Aquinas in arguing that the simultaneous experience of
contingency and the seeming possibility of transcendence is, for the
person, the locus point of the arrival of anxiety in the mind.11 This
anxiety overwhelms a person, moreover, to the point of neurotic
collapse, especially when this sense of exile escalates into a fear of
the void itself which the anxious person associates with the total
dissolution, or death, of self. While common to moderns in their
general failed acknowledgment of the infinite, this fear, interestingly,
Balthasar believes to be absent to the medieval mind, which is due,
he avers, to an apparently overwhelming collective faith in God. Be
that as it may, the anxiety Balthasar associates with the experience
of the ontological difference emerges in the awareness of limitation.
9
Augustine Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick [Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992]) 8.10.22.
10
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre
von letzten Haltungen, 3vols. 3rd ed. (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1998) 141.
11
Balthasar, CA, 74 (Eng. 124).

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Moreover, the experience of the awareness of limit and finitude

against an infinite horizon introduces a second element, which for
Balthasar is the encounter with objective mystery that is experienced
as awe in the presence of something unfamiliar and mysterious in
the familiar.12 Interestingly, Balthasar asserts that the apprehension of
mystery, and the anxiety that arises from such an apprehension, is not
limited to the inner world of a person. For example, Balthasar assays
the “familiar,” in terms of the world of beings as such, concluding
that what is sensible is rendered mysterious precisely when something
other is recognized in it, while yet remaining concealed.13 Balthasar
interprets this experience as a catching sight (ansichtig wird) of the
presence of the infinite, which leads one to seek out the source of this
encounter.14 This movement is the search for the mysterious in the
mundane; for example, when one seeks out the source of the shudder
that overcomes one in the presence of the roaring sea and the crash-
ing thunder, or the longing of one who desires to know the source
of attraction “behind” the setting sun and the surrounding landscape
it illumines. This experience of mystery has an erotic dimension in
that one yearns to be united with the source of the experience of
the universal in the particular, the one in the many. As Paul Tillich
remarked, this movement is an awareness of existential estrangement
and the subsequent move toward essential being.15 And yet, the fear
of no return of that love, indeed of nothingness at all, entails that
man’s engagement with mystery produces an element of anxiety, for
in the particular experience of mystery, i.e., God qua the infinite, is
recognized without ever being reducible to any one object of per-
ception. God is elusive, yet somehow perceivable. This experience is
precisely what is meant by an encounter with the transcendent and
mysterious source of beings, the unfamiliar in the familiar.16
This recognition of the unfamiliar in the familiar data of human
experience likewise is the occasion of man’s awareness of the onto-
logical difference as man perceives the mystery of infinite freedom
in the object of his apprehension. According to Balthasar, this catch-
ing sight of the signification of something extraordinary in ordinary
experiences of the sensible world betokens the moment of the infi-
nite’s arrival to, and apprehension by, the conscious mind.17 Balthasar
asserts:
With respect to content, however, this double movement is the draw-
ing away and uprooting [abstraction] of the mind from its familiar
12
Ibid., 69 (Eng., 117).
13
Ibid. (Eng., 117–118).
14
Ibid., 68–69 (Eng., 117–118).
15
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 127.
16
Balthasar, CA, 69 (Eng., 118).
17
Ibid. (Eng., 118).

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environment into the unfamiliar horizon of Being and then its retreat
back to the world, which now becomes visible for the first time in
its character of being an appearance [phantasma], resulting from its
contingency and un-familiarity. The excessus, the ekstasis of thought
beyond sensation conceals within itself the first beginnings of anxiety
– not because a larger space opens up, but because this space, which
makes conceptualization possible, is still inadequate to offer a satis-
factory interpretation of the objective world, indeed, precisely because
this yawning ontological difference rules out such an interpretation.
The same structure that reveals the truth of Being also veils it; the
same structure that causes the light of Being and of the agent intellect
(intellectus agens) to dawn also spreads to the same extent the night of
meaninglessness and incomprehensibility. In the ontological difference
the world becomes abstract in two directions: the existent loses some
of its importance inasmuch as it is seen as the appearance of Being,
and Being gains nothing in importance inasmuch as it is dependent
upon this existent as its appearance.18
In short, the mysterious experience of the ontological difference
(again, the experience of infinite freedom, of infinite expansiveness
present within both the landscape of the inner world of the human
subject and the exterior world of creaturely being) shakes the mind
into anxiety, for this “difference” casts an ever-present shadow that
irrevocably accompanies thought. This mysterious experience is an
incontrovertible and concrete fact of human experience; and the in-
ability to elucidate this experience in a meaningful, that is, theological
manner is, according to Balthasar, one of the central root causes of
anxiety in the modern world. In other words, each person must go
beyond the fear that arises out of the experience of limit and mystery.
One must, that is, set one’s gaze not on the fear itself, in the vain at-
tempt of overcoming it, but on the infinite presence made manifest at
the border of one’s experience of limit and mystery—otherwise, one
will remain absorbed in self-obsessive anxiety. Such a need to attend
to the infinite entails for Balthasar that only a theological reading
of anxiety can make sense of anxiety’s presence in the life of each
person.
The next logical question for Balthasar, therefore, is how to under-
stand theologically the origin of this anxiety-producing void created
in the experience of the ontological difference.19 This question, our
second issue for examination, presupposes that for Balthasar the only
meaningful response to the limit and mystery one encounters in the
experience of the infinite, must come from outside, from the infinite
itself. In short, anxiety results because helplessness, radical depen-
dency, and a futile sense of having no control define the human
experience of the infinite, as one is simply unable to unite in oneself
18
Ibid., 78 (Eng., 130–131).
19
Ibid., 80 (Eng., 133).

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the finite and infinite dimensions/tensions inherent to one’s conscious

life.
III. The theological response to anxiety
For Balthasar, the most tantalizing aspects of the ontological differ-

ence are how the mind is able to grasp this difference at all and
why the mind is unable to “unlock” the secrets accompanying it (the
mind) through its own efforts. The resounding question, presented in
various ways down through the centuries, can be expressed in the
following manner: Why can there ever only be a partial, and ulti-
mately mysterious, knowledge of infinite freedom, indeed of God?
The question of the shadowy presence of the infinite to the human
mind presupposes, paradoxically, some kind of absence—an absence
that initially caused wonder and awe, but can only lead to an ever-
greater yearning for more: more of being, more of infinite life, more
of God. One can only say with Balthasar that the origin of anxiety is,
and can only be, explained theologically as sin, that is, sin understood
as the falling away from intimacy with, and trust in, the infinite God.
Balthasar writes, “The void that opens up in the mind, the occasion
of its anxiety, could then be traced back to an absence—and whose
absence, if not that of its Creator and grace-giver, the ‘sweet guest of
the soul’ who had chosen it as his residence?”20 But this understand-
ing does not dismiss the experience of the ontological difference as
something intrinsically evil, as an unfortunate consequence of some
primeval event that involved an apple and a serpent. As Balthasar
tells us, the ontological difference is “by necessity the very imprint
of creatureliness itself, in whatever state the creature may be.”21 The
issue is rather the quality of the experience of God in the conscious
life of the person.
With sin, precisely the inexplicable happens as one turn’s one’s
gaze on oneself in order to sate one’s own desires apart from the
will of God: one chooses darkness over light; one chooses to go
one’s own way and do one’s own thing. One chooses, that is, to
shift one’s gaze away from God and towards the self as the mea-
sure of what is real; and so, no longer consenting to be determined
by God, one is lost; and in one’s state of being lost, one is made
anxious. Such a condition, Balthasar avers, “expands” in some way
the distance between a person and God, while the void is filled,
so to speak, with one’s own obsessions and fears. It follows then,
that the person is responsible for God’s perceived withdrawal and for
establishing the void where meaningfulness and life with the infinite
20
Ibid., 80 (Eng., 133–134).
21
Ibid. (Eng., 133).

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should be. For Balthasar, what is most alarming is the fact that if
God does not act to reverse this existential tragedy, man will renew
this rebellion against the light on a daily basis. This understanding is
Balthasar’s existentially informed rendering of the fall of humanity
and his understanding of why there is anxiety at all:
We are not saying that Adam saw God face to face, for if that had been
true, his subsequent falling away from God would be inexplicable. We
say only that the space within Adam that became a place of emptiness
and indifferent freedom through the withdrawal of the divine presence
was a space that God had originally created for himself and had filled
with his mysteriousness and, on the other hand, unquestionable pres-
ence. It was a presence in faith, naturally, but it occurred in a now
no longer attainable obedience and love that possessed and embraced
God immediately and with childlike certainty. A faith for which God,
though not seen face to face, is the most present, most concrete re-
ality, whence all that is substantial in the world receives its equally
certain and unquestionable rightness, obviousness, and nameability. In
the evening breeze of paradise God walks and talks with Adam: invis-
ible, yet as tangible and all-pervasive as the wind. In him we live, and
move, and have our being.22
And so, for Balthasar, the experience of the ontological difference
must be given a theological reading vis-à-vis the biblical account
of the fall of humanity. From this perspective, Balthasar’s approach
moves definitively in an original direction, that is, away from other
modern and secular interpretations of anxiety that are grounded in
decidedly philosophical preoccupations with the self, to a theological
explanation focused more on the biblical narrative and the saving ac-
tivity of God. However, before elucidating more fully Balthasar’s the-
ological position, and in order to provide some context with respect
to those interpretations of anxiety that Balthasar challenges, a brief
description will be provided of the philosophical positions towards
anxiety taken by some of his modern interlocuters: Kierkegaard,
Heidegger, and Freud.
IV. Balthasar’s critique of classic philosophical

interpretations of anxiety
Kierkegaard is the thinker that Balthasar most obviously engages in

Der Christ und die Angst.23 It is Kierkegaard who articulates the pos-
sibilities of anxiety as originating within the dynamic space between
the finite and infinite dimensions of the person; the space, that is,
where one becomes aware that one’s freedom is actually grounded
22
Ibid., 81–82 (Eng., 135).
23
Ibid., 12 (Eng., 38).

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in what he names the possibility of unlimited possibilities.24 Impor-

tantly, Kierkegaard recognized that only by an act of the infinite can
one’s anxiety be quelled, and here Kierkegaard appeals to the role
of faith as a necessary medium for the arrival of the infinite in the
void: “Now the anxiety of possibility holds him as its prey until,
saved, it must hand him over to faith. In no other place can he find
rest, for every other place of rest is mere chatter, although in the
eyes of men it is sagacity.”25 Kierkegaard’s elucidation of the role of
faith in overcoming anxiety is enormously critical to understanding
Balthasar’s own work on anxiety. However, to Balthasar’s thinking,
Kierkegaard’s work on anxiety is incomplete in that it remains a
purely philosophical analysis focused predominantly on subjective
experience, though certainly not devoid of any ultimate theological
conclusions.26 Balthasar argues that for Kierkegaard, anxiety arises
in the mind when one perceives the mind’s openness to the infinite,
while concomitantly remaining acutely aware of one’s limitations as
a finite being. Indeed, Kierkegaard says that “(w)hen the discov-
eries of possibility are honestly admitted, possibility will discover
all the finitudes, but it will idealize them in the form of infinity,
and so the individual will then be overwhelmed by anxiety until
he again overcomes them in the anticipation of faith.”27 In other
words, Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety suggests to Balthasar that
he (Kierkegaard) does not move successfully beyond the “finitudes”
which seem to redound always to the necessity of faith. As long
as the mind is capable of perceiving the co-presence of the finite
and infinite one is ineluctably made anxious precisely because the
finite human knower is utterly incapable of overcoming the abyss
that constitutes the relation with the infinite.28 Of course, such an
understanding makes sense when seen in the light of Kierkegaard’s
vitriolic response to Hegelian sublation. To Balthasar’s thinking, how-
ever, this preoccupation of Kierkegaard’s to unmask the dangers of
identity thinking never developed beyond a philosophical critique and
presentation of anxiety.
The problem with Kierkegaard, Balthasar maintains, is that he is
so absorbed with reflecting upon the structure of the finite mind
and its relationship to anxiety, that he can never adequately assay
the relationship between the mind and God and how God acts to
alleviate the anxiety of the individual: “Kierkegaard operates here
with the categories of Romanticism and of German Idealism. And
24
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert
B. Anderson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 42.
25
Ibid., 158.
26
27
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 157.
28
Ibid., 155.

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while his intention is a Christian one, he so emphasizes the relation

of the spirit to itself that he risks forgetting the main point: the
relation to God.”29 To Balthasar, the mind is anxious because of the
void in his inner world that betokens the absence of God. Anxiety is
the hell of God’s absence:
As for the essence of anxiety, it is quite true that Kierkegaard identified
its point of origin rightly but he did not sufficiently describe, with
respect to its content, the vertigo caused by the void that opens up
within the finitude of the mind. The mind is made anxious, not by the
void of nothingness in its own interior dimension, but by the abysmal
emptiness present wherever the nearness and concreteness of God have
withdrawn into a distant estrangement and have yielded their place to
“someone over there,” to an abstract relation to an “other.”30
While Kierkegaard is extremely insightful in pointing out the ori-
gins of anxiety, namely, the discovery and experience of the void
present to consciousness, as well as the only response to this void,
namely, faith, he nevertheless fails to ground anxiety in an overar-
ching theological narrative that, for Balthasar, alone can make sense
of this phenomenon. This failure to provide a theological solution is
why Balthasar will argue at the outset of CA that “anxiety remains
for him [Kierkegaard] a matter of the finite mind horrified by its
limitlessness, and thus God and Christ are rarely mentioned directly
in this work [Concept of Anxiety], which was nevertheless intended
to be an exclusively Christian book.”31 As a result, Balthasar avers,
this understanding of Kierkegaard shaped the book’s later destiny:
“(O)riginally a response to philosophical and psychological chal-
lenges, the book did not free itself sufficiently from them to avoid
dissolving again into philosophy, on the one hand, and psychology,
on the other, and so its ultimate fate was a twofold secularization.”32
Because Kierkegaard is seemingly occupied with the identity thinking
of his philosophical predecessors, he fails to amplify the thread of his
argument, namely, that faith alone overcomes existential anxiety, by
not providing a theological response grounded in the saving activity
of God with respect to the void as this is conveyed in the biblical
narrative of Christianity.
Another important dialogue partner in CA, though of less impor-
tance to Balthasar than Kierkegaard, is Martin Heidegger. Unlike
Freud, who evades the metaphysical dimension of the human per-
son altogether in his consideration of the provenance of anxiety,
Heidegger understands anxiety to arise precisely in the awareness
of Being and the dread [angst] that arises in one’s positing of the
29
30
Ibid., 85 (Eng., 140–141).
31
Ibid., 7 (Eng., 32).
32
Ibid., 7–8 (Eng., 32).

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possibility of not being at all (Das Nichts). Given that the starting
point for such a consideration is the ontological difference, there is
a philosophical kinship between Heidegger and Balthasar. Again, for
Heidegger, anxiety arises in the awareness of the possibility of not-
being, that is to say, anxiety is induced by reflection upon the limit
of existence and the awareness of being able not to be.33 Anxiety
is quite literally the fear of nothingness, of consignment of self to
oblivion. But in order to be aware of this nothingness, one must be
able to posit Being; for it is Being that provides the infinite back-
drop to man’s finite horizon and possibilities. The awareness (and
fact) of Being gives rise to the question: What does it mean not
to be? This is, arguably, the encounter with the void of which we
have been speaking, for it is the finite person’s conscious aware-
ness of self and the self’s limitations prescinding from the subject’s
first perception of Being. However, in the case of Heidegger (and
Kierkegaard), the main preoccupation is to provide a philosophical
study of precisely that experience (finite man and infinite Being). I
believe Balthasar ultimately rejects this approach as a morbid obses-
sion that cannot get past the person’s reflection on his/her own fini-
tude. There is even the suggestion by Balthasar that there is a lack of
courage in Heidegger’s position insofar as his preoccupation with self,
with Dasein, presupposes a kind of flight from the encounter with
God.34
While both Kierkegaard and Heidegger fall short of providing an
acceptable reading of anxiety, their insights nevertheless bring one
to the border of a properly theological reading. However, given that
anxiety is quite common in the West, and so is a problem that re-
quires immediate attention, one asks at this point which interpreter of
anxiety has had the greatest impact on modern culture generally? Has
it been Kierkegaard and/or Heidegger? One might, however, suggest
Sigmund Freud, which is apparently Balthasar’s position as well.35
While Kierkegaard and Heidegger are Balthasar’s immediate inter-
locutors, one may contend that the most fruitful aspect of Balthasar’s
insights on anxiety can be used to counter the secular interpretation
of Freud.
It is well known that Freud had much to say about the provenance
of anxiety.36 Freud’s starting point intentionally dismisses the meta-
physical dimension of the human person in favor of an empirical,
33
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press,
1996), 176–177.
34
35
Ibid., 8 (Eng., 32). Balthasar’s strident criticism of Freud and the culture of psy-
chotherapy that he spawned is described by him (Balthasar) as a toxic antidote (giftigen
Gegengift) to anxiety by modern persons (see p. 10 (Eng., 36).
36
See Sigmund Freud, The Problem of Anxiety, trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 1963).

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“scientific” presentation. With Freud, anxiety is approached from a

purely natural/empirical angle. Freud’s reading of anxiety is, how-
ever, very interesting and germane to our study. He seems, however
unintentionally, to transpose themes that typically constitute theologi-
cal language surrounding the God-human relationship into empirical,
scientific categories. More precisely, Freud argues that anxiety arises
from the “repression of instinctual drives,” and that the most basic
repressed experience is the danger to one’s life that is experienced in
birth, i.e., the danger of separation from the safety of the mother’s
womb and solitude as the person is thrown into a foreign, seemingly
hostile world.37 As a result, Freud tells us that “anxiety thus seems
to be a reaction to the perception of the absence of the object.”38
This sense of helplessness and loneliness, coupled with a longing for
safety that occurs with parturition—separation anxiety!—is grounded
in the perceived loss of the object’s love.39 Given our account of
Balthasar’s approach to anxiety, Freud is quite on the mark in his
assessment of the thematic characteristics of anxiety: namely, the
experience of separation and fear of solitude and alienation; the over-
whelming “sense” of abandonment and helplessness in the face of
this separation; sadness over the loss of one’s love. How can one not
perceive, albeit through the lens of modern psychiatry, the presence
of the experience of Adam in the Garden? Freud is re-writing the
story of the Fall in a different key and with an altogether differ-
ent instrument. Yet, Freud intentionally dismisses any metaphysical
account of the structure of the human person, which is de facto a
radical rejection of the Catholic and Balthasarian understanding of
the person. It is Rudolph Allers who articulates well the reason we
cannot accept Freud’s conclusions: “We must remember that the fun-
damental hypotheses that form the starting-point of psychoanalysis
are unacceptable when regarded from the standpoint of a positive
metaphysic and from a Catholic conception of the universe.”40 The
Roman Catholic conception of the universe depends upon the signifi-
cation of God to the human knower, precisely as the epistemological
and ontological ground. To suggest otherwise, as Freud intentionally
does, is to risk deepening the person’s alienation from God and sub-
sequent consignment to the miasma of anxiety. Having formulated
the basic philosophical understandings of anxiety, we are now in a
position to introduce our fourth point, namely, to elucidate more fully
Balthasar’s theological contribution to the understanding of anxiety
as it specifically unfolds in CA.
37
Ibid., 75.
38
Ibid., 76.
39
Ibid., 84.
40
Allers, The Psychology of Character, 338.

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IV. The Biblical Response to Anxiety
Balthasar’s reading centers on Christ. Christ is the one who in his

life, especially in his anguish in the Passion, experienced and ac-
cepted anxiety (the absence of God’s presence) completely; and by
his suffering he gave meaning to it.41 In CA, Balthasar provides a
qualification for his theological and christocentric explication of anx-
iety by first addressing the narrative of the Old Testament. According
to Balthasar, the Old Testament provides an historical account of a
people who in their own way experienced the ontological gulf be-
tween humanity and God and in that experience perceived rightly
the need for a mediator, which is to say a saving act on the part of
God. And so, the proper understanding of anxiety, which culminates
in christology, begins with the collective experience of Yahweh by
Israel.
Balthasar avers that the Psalms of the Old Testament are filled with
images of a languishing people that cry out to God for justice and
mercy, and of a God who in yearning for his people, seems to permit,
indeed longs for, that cry that he might approach them with some
saving action.42 Yet, again and again, as we see in Job, the approach
of the Lord is itself anxiety-inducing. (Job 7:14–15) God’s coming
in darkness causes one to tremble with fear as the overpowering
presence of the righteous God is akin to a penetrating light that lays
bare all the guilt and sin of each person. And so Balthasar writes,
“Here it becomes obvious that one cannot live in such immediacy;
he will be burned up by the sheer superiority of God’s power.”43 For
“no arrangement, no agreement, no dialogue is possible where the
naked Absolute and the naked contingent collide.”44
Anxiety in the Old Testament occurs in two distinct ways. On
the one hand, it occurs when one turns away from God, only to be
greeted by the torturous and searing loneliness and meaninglessness
of life apart from God. Balthasar writes, “The descent to the river of
the netherworld begins already in the subjective isolation of sinning –
for sin is a striving to evade the communication of divine light.”45
On the other hand, anxiety is experienced when one is approached
by God, as he is overwhelmed, blinded one might say, by a presence
too powerful for words. Citing scripture, Balthasar responds,
God, who delivers himself up for the creature, is a “devouring fire, a
jealous God” (Deut 4:24), so much so that to see him and to live are
incompatible things – hence, Isaiah considers himself lost because he
41
42
Ibid., 29 (Eng., 63).
43
Ibid., 30–31 (Eng., 65).
44
Ibid., 31 (Eng., 65).
45
Ibid., 19 (Eng., 47).

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has seen the king with his own eyes (Is 6:5), and Daniel, dazed, falls
on his face in a deep sleep before him (Dan 10:9). After issuing the
command to fear none of the things that make the wicked anxious,
God has to add: “The Lord of hosts . . . let him be your fear, and let
him be your dread” (Is 8:13).46
Yahweh’s approach is overwhelming and always comes with the de-
mand for obedience.47 This is the paradox of ancient Israel’s rela-
tionship to Yahweh. If they turn away from him, they are benighted
with anxiety and hopelessness. When Yahweh approaches, they are
aware of their failure, sin, and inability to keep his laws; thus they
are struck down in terror and fear. Balthasar, echoing Job, is right
to point out that humanity requires a mediator to be saved from this
inescapable anxiety.
Job cries out, not for his children, his property, his wife, his friends, but
for a mediator: “Would that there were a judge between us, who might
lay his hand upon us both. Let God take his rod away from me, and let
not my fear of him terrify me (9:33–34).” He cries out for justice with
God, which can come to him only from God; he appeals from God to
God (16:19–20): from a hidden, absent, and incomprehensible God to
to such a One who would turn toward man in a human way (23:1–7);
from a God who for him has “changed into Satan” and whom one can
no longer call upon since he has become an utter No, to a God who,
beyond all dialectic of anxiety, would simply say Yes to man.48
Balthasar tells us that the anguish of Job, who represents Israel’s
relationship with Yahweh, is experienced not only with respect to
actual material suffering, but in the anxiety caused by “the intrusion
of darkness into the finite realm of faith’s light.”49 A mediator is
necessary. Yet, the mediator promised does not come simply in order
to abolish anxiety. If a mediator is necessary, and he is, then he can
only become human by entering into the full experience of a human
being.50 Balthasar is speaking here of the necessity of the anxiety of
the mediator himself.51
Thus, the experience of the Old Covenant, that is, the “intrusion of
darkness into the finite realm of faith’s light,” becomes God’s own
experience in the New Testament; indeed the Jewish experience is
an “anticipation of the Cross, of God’s own anguish.”52 From the
moment of Jesus’s birth, his entrance into finite existence, “anxiety
46
Ibid., 25 (Eng., 57).
47
Ibid., 26 (Eng., 59).
48
Ibid., 31 (Eng., 65–66).
49
Ibid., 36 (Eng., 73).
50
Ibid., 37 (Eng., 74).
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 36–37 (Eng., 73).

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is not spared him but rolls over him like waves,” right up to his hour
in the garden:
On the Mount of Olives it is a final, precipitous plunge into the abyss
of anxiety that immediately breaks over him: vicariously, for every
sinner and every sin, he suffers the anxiety of facing the God of
absolute righteousness. All that the Old and New Covenants know
of anxiety is here gathered together and infinitely surpassed, because
the person who in this human nature is frightened is the infinite God
himself.53
In this event, God knows what it is like for man to experience the
overwhelming and sometimes maddening experience of the worst
kind of anxiety – the utter desolation that follows from the absence
of God:
It is, finally and most profoundly, the anguish that Christ suffers on
account of his world, which is in danger of being lost to him – which,
indeed, at that moment is an utterly lost world. So as to be able to
suffer this anxiety and therein to demonstrate humanly how much the
world matters to him in his divinity and how concerned he is for
the world’s sake: for this purpose he became man. It is an anguish
he wanted to have without any consolation or relief, since from it
was to come every consolation and relief for the world. Therefore it
is, in the proper and strict sense of the word, the absolute anxiety,
which undergirds and surpasses every other anxiety and thus becomes
the standard and tribunal for all. This anxiety is drained to the dregs
upon the Cross in the actual abandonment of the Son by the Father.
Since the subject who endures this abandonment in his human nature
is divine, it is an absolute forsakenness and therefore the absolute
measure of the abyss and of every other abysmal experience. Only the
Son knows exhaustively what it means to be forsaken by the Father, for
he alone knows who the Father is and what the Father’s intimacy and
love are.54
What one learns from this is that God does not come to abolish anx-
iety, for it is a given of human existence as such, but rather comes
to enter into it himself and therefore to be in solidarity with suffer-
ing humanity; and in this solidarity God revalues anxiety by giving
humanity a perspective and orientation for overcoming it. The Incar-
nation of God, which signifies the promise of the mediator, alone
gives meaning to anxiety, especially in the abandonment undergone
on the Cross. Christ teaches that fear and anxiety are quite real when
understood as separation from God. It is this separation that Balthasar
likens to the void of our human experience of the ontological dif-
ference, which is the encounter between human finite consciousness
and the dimly perceived infinite. The yawning gap between them
53
Ibid., 37 (Eng., 74).
54
Ibid., 38 (Eng.,75).

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(finite consciousness and the infinite), shrouded in darkness, is an

indication of this “separation.” It is little wonder that sin is perceived
in the Bible as a burning sensation, like salt being rubbed into the
wound that is a person’s torn soul. But, as Balthasar’s account of the
Incarnation teaches, the fact of the ontological difference, the void
between finite and infinite that governs one’s perception of Being,
does not condemn one to anxiety. God does not abandon humans.
Balthasar’s originality, therefore, can be seen with his attempt for
the first time to complete the philosophical presentation of anxiety
(Kierkegaard) by way of a theological and Christological rendering.
The solution he proposes for all Christians is the imitatio Christi at
the level of encounter.
The encounter between the infinite God and the finite person,
which is the ever-present and guiding theme driving Balthasar’s
thought, is at the heart of this understanding of anxiety as well;
indeed, there never is one without the other. The moment when a per-
son is aware of Being, he or she enters the dimension of encounter
with the infinite God. But the sheer strangeness and unfamiliarity of
this ‘presence’ calls to mind an even greater awareness of absence.
Metaphorically speaking, one undergoes a vertiginous experience as
one stands atop a cliff in which the drop is incalculable and yet into
which one is called to leap. Yet Balthasar helps us navigate through
this vertiginous experience. In the first place, Balthasar tells us that
anxiety has been entirely defeated by the Cross, for anxiety is “one
of the authorities, powers, and dominions over which the Lord tri-
umphed.”55 The inescapable anxiety of the Old Testament presents
the reader only with a finite sense of hope that anxiety will not be
the last word; for the hope of Israel was of a mediator who had
not yet arrived. Since Christ illumines the earth with the presence
of heaven in himself, thus bridging the infinite and the finite, “the
finitude of grace and its modality of hope” is finally removed.56 This
prompts Balthasar to assert boldly that “fear has been invalidated”
and, remarkably, that anxiety is now prohibited!57 In other words,
human beings have no reason to fear or be anxious.58 One perceives
a rejection of Heidegger and a resounding “No” to modern philos-
ophy that would entreat man to accept anxiety with a kind of Stoic
resoluteness:
If it is true that anxiety about being in the world, about being forlorn,
about the world itself, about all its supposedly or really unfathomable
dimensions, anxiety about death and anxiety about perhaps inescapable
55
Ibid., 42 (Eng., 81).
56
Ibid. (Eng., 82).
57
Ibid., 43 (Eng., 82).
58
Ibid. (Eng., 83).

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guilt – lies at the root of modern consciousness; if it is true that this

anxiety is the basis of contemporary neuroses and that this anxiety is
supposed to be overcome through a modern existentialist philosophy
by entering into it and affirming it and enduring it with determination
to the very end, then to all of this Christianity can only say a radical
No. By no means does a Christian have permission for or access to
this kind of anxiety.59
Yet, if anxiety has been forbidden by Christ, what must the person
do? Again, there is only one thing and that is to imitate Christ on the
Cross by surrendering all of one’s hope and trust to God. One must,
and can only, make an absolute decision for God in one’s attempt to
overcome anxiety.60 Because of the concrete example of Christ, one
follows him by consenting to be present in the space, to wait (latin)
as it were with Christ who himself has descended into the absence,
into the void made ever wider by human sin.
Balthasar avers that the promise of freedom from anxiety is rooted
in this decision.61 And this decision must be resolute, for falling
back into sin casts one back into the anxiety of the sinner which
is grounded in emptiness and meaninglessness—the darkness of
Hades.62 Freedom from anxiety depends on “not going astray.”63
Man is called to be fearless, daring to face whatever suffering comes
his way and not to retreat into himself.64 Unfortunately, Balthasar
does not provide the reader in CA with an example of what this
decision for God looks like in the ordinary life of the Christian. For
example, he could have spoken about temptation as the occasion for
making a courageous act of trust.
Balthasar does, however, provide a sustained account of the en-
counter between God and the person, and the decision one must
make for God in his 1955 work Prayer. In this work Balthasar ar-
gues consistently that if, after the initial encounter between God and
the person, the person resorts to her own thought in order to make
sense of the encounter itself, indeed “to explain” the relationship she
assumes to have with God, she runs the risk of falling into subjec-
tive, even Gnostic, pride. It is in prayer, that is, the basic opening of
self to God in an act of surrendering love and devotion, indeed, in
a consent to be silent, to wait for God in the void, that one has an
example of what the decision or at least the occasion for trust looks
like. Prayer is the way to enter into and emerge out of the void; not
that prayer does away with the void, but rather is the experience of
59
Ibid., 45–46 (Eng., 86).
60
Ibid., 26 (Eng., 58).
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid., 32 (Eng., 67).
63
Ibid., 33 (Eng., 68).
64
Ibid., 47 (Eng., 88).

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not being alone in the void.65 Only in an authentic life of devotion

and sacrifice, of concern for the “obligations” of the natural and su-
pernatural, can one find freedom from anxiety. In other words, the
only life that can surmount the torment of anxiety is the one that is
turned away from the gloomy obsession with finitude and toward the
infinite God in an act of surrendering love no matter what perils lie
before a person.66 Allers tells us that this characterizes the life of the
saint: “It follows that the only person who can be entirely free from
neurosis is the man . . . who has steadfastly accepted and affirmed his
position as a creature and his place in the order of creation; in other
words, beyond the neurotic there stands only the saint.”67
Even though Balthasar has argued that anxiety is forbidden to the
Christian, he was speaking of a particular kind of anxiety, namely,
anxiety that comes both from sin and from the failure to hope and
trust in God. For anxiety, whether “bad” or “good,” is constitutive of
human experience. Thus, something like anxiety is allowed to perdure
in the one who, having advanced in the spiritual life, shares in the
suffering of Jesus on the Cross. What this entails is an experience of
the love that Jesus the Son ultimately experienced from the Father
who raised him from the dead. It is precisely in this deepening
of one’s decision for and abandonment to God, exemplified in the
sufferings of Jesus on the Cross, that anxiety resurfaces; but this
is an anxiety of a wholly different kind. On the one hand, one is
undergoing a kind of final purgation of self-determination and sin,
so as to experience more fully the light of God. The anxiety of the
sinner, on the other hand, is a fire that can only lead to the despair
and confusion of utter darkness:
There is an objective basis to the sin-anxiety that is forbidden to the
Christian, and in that anxiety the properties of sin disclose themselves:
a turning away, flight, a rigidity of life, sterility, desolation, the plunge
into the abyss, constriction, incarceration, withdrawing into self, ban-
ishment. In contrast, the basis for the anxiety of the Cross is nothing
other than the love of God, who takes this entire world of anxiety
upon himself so as to surmount it by suffering, a love that is in all
respects the opposite of the sinner’s experience of anxiety: it is instead
a turning toward, an availability, life, fruitfulness, security and support,
expansiveness, liberation.68
In short, to Balthasar, the courage of the Christian, which can cer-
tainly be laden with anxiety, is in turn nothing other than an act of
faith, in which one dares to place oneself and the whole world in
65
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1986). See especially Chapter One: The Necessity of Contemplation.
66
See Allers, The Psychology of Character, 348.
67
Ibid., 346.
68
Balthasar, CA, 48–49 (Eng., 90).

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the hand of the One who can dispose of a person for death and for
life.69
V. Conclusion
Anxiety betokens the awareness of the encounter with the infinite,

of the presence (and absence!) of transcendence, of Being. Anxiety,
therefore, characterizes the state of the mind that is brought before
the infinite to the encounter with God that always already requires
a decision for God. Practically speaking, this means the decision
(with Kierkegaard) to entrust oneself to God.70 The alleviation of
the anxiety that originates with the act of entrusting oneself to an
unknown God/Infinite is possible because of the concrete appearance
and the lived experience of God himself (it is here that we see why
Balthasar forbids anxiety!); for with Christ the void is now suffused
with his presence.71 The very possibility for freedom from anxiety
rests with the surrender of one’s whole life to Christ. It is in this
surrender that one creates a space which God alone can fill: “Right
where I become intentional about bearing my heart and my life, the
real power, which is not mine but God’s, radiates most purely.”72
Anxiety characterizes that moment of encounter and decision: one
either surrenders to God, who has sent his Christ to bridge heaven
and earth by conveying him to the void, or one retreats into oneself
by looking past God and gazing at the void itself.
Anthony Cirelli
241 Bethel Ave
Staten Island, NY 10307
Email: cirellia@stjohns.edu
69
Ibid., 49 (Eng., 90)
70
Ibid., 95 (Eng., 154).
71
Ibid., 87 (Eng.., 142–143).
72
Ibid., 95 (Eng., 154).

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17412005, 2011, 1042, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-2005.2010.01388.x by University Of Toronto Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [30/12/2022].

Facing the Abyss: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s

At the heart of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s oeuvre is his preoccupation

phenomenon can only be rightly understood by means of a the-

II. The experience of the ontological difference

The psychiatrist and philosopher Rudolph Allers, an early mentor of

essential component of the neurotic character: “The neurotic,” Allers

void, a nothingness.9 By means of sin, therefore, one makes thicker

Moreover, the experience of the awareness of limit and finitude

the finite and infinite dimensions/tensions inherent to one’s conscious

III. The theological response to anxiety

For Balthasar, the most tantalizing aspects of the ontological differ-

IV. Balthasar’s critique of classic philosophical

Kierkegaard is the thinker that Balthasar most obviously engages in

in what he names the possibility of unlimited possibilities.24 Impor-

while his intention is a Christian one, he so emphasizes the relation

“scientific” presentation. With Freud, anxiety is approached from a

IV. The Biblical Response to Anxiety

Balthasar’s reading centers on Christ. Christ is the one who in his

(finite consciousness and the infinite), shrouded in darkness, is an

guilt – lies at the root of modern consciousness; if it is true that this

not being alone in the void.65 Only in an authentic life of devotion

Anxiety betokens the awareness of the encounter with the infinite,

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